Storm of Words: Science, Religion, and Evolution in the Civil War Era by Monte Harrell Hampton (review)

Monte Hampton has produced an excellent historical study of antievolutionism in the nineteenth-century South, and the insights that it offers to public address scholars may well equip them to understand communication patterns well outside the range of this one period. Although public address scholars are often concerned with messages that have religious origins and meanings, one often senses that these patterns are interpreted with little regard for these exterior contexts. Perhaps it will seem sufficient to know that the "house divided" in Lincoln's famous speech was a nation half slave and half free. But the phrase may tell us something more about Southerners' reaction to Lincoln once we recognize the accusatory point implied by this biblical allusion—namely, that one part of this house belonged to Satan and the other to God. I mention this caution as a way of reminding readers that, despite the fact that Monte Hampton's book explores the reactions of one Protestant sect to evolution, it also speaks to wider rhetorical patterns that bear upon Americans' reception of science.

The "storm" metaphor in Hampton's title gives some indication of the broader cultural geography over which this evolution controversy raged in the American South, but one of the book's most interesting features is the quiet stillness that stood at the center of this storm, the person of James Woodrow. As much as this is an examination of the theological and hermeneutical bases of Southern Presbyterian resistance to modern science, its detailed look at Woodrow brings to light some important irenic possibilities for science and faith. An ordained minister, eclectic public intellectual, and eminent scientist, in fact a protégé of Louis Agassiz's at Harvard University, James Woodrow was appointed in 1859 as the Perkins Professor of Natural Science in Connection with Revealed Religion at the Southern Presbyterian Seminary in Columbia, South Carolina. The Perkins chair was created in direct response to the theological anxieties that were arising as modern geology increasingly appeared to contradict traditional interpretations of the Bible. The expectation of the learned Presbyterians who created this position was that its occupant's scientific instruction would fully vindicate orthodoxy, and in an important sense they were right. Woodrow continued to embrace the core doctrines of Southern Presbyterian Calvinism throughout his life, and he did so without rejecting any of the mainstream developments in geology and evolutionary science. Despite his solid orthodoxy, his acceptance of biological evolution eventually resulted in accusations of heresy and his forced resignation in the 1880s. Although Woodrow's acquittal on heresy charges was later reversed at a higher level of the Presbyterian Church, the denomination continued to recognize him as an ordained minister in good standing.

The arguments and motives that sustained this controversy are recognizably similar to those that continue to make biological evolution a touchy subject for many American religionists. But in putting the faith-friendly wisdom of Woodrow at the center of his story, Hampton also draws our attention to resources of understanding that might usefully be applied to the present situation. In chapter 6 of the book, Hampton explores Woodrow's general take on the apparent incompatibility of the Bible and science. His employers had commissioned him to instruct students on how to harmonize revelation and science, but Woodrow recognized that the meaning of revelation is always bounded by the premises readers bring to it, whether from their culture or their theology. This meant that faith could not come to terms with science merely by striving to harmonize its teachings with the Bible. It also needed to carefully scrutinize questions bearing upon language and interpretation, the hermeneutical side of knowledge. Woodrow's take on this problem caused him to move away from the presumptions expressed in the metaphor of "harmony" and to favor instead an approach built upon the presumption of "noncontradiction" (164–66).

The theologian and...